I am a Burmese exile taking a near-permanent refuge in New York and Sydney. Here are my essays about Burma and anything else I feel like writing about. And posting the articles I like from selected sites. Bridging Burma to the world this Blog is more of a Politically-Oriented Literary Blog than a Plain News Blog or a Sophisticated Thoughts Blog.

Thursday, May 12, 2016

Mark Zuckerberg And New Progressive Plutocrats

Silicon Valley inspires utopian
thinking. After revolutionising everything from the media to communications to
taxi services, progressive elites in the Bay Area are now eyeing up government
and politics, wondering how they can “disrupt” both. Will American politics
survive their delusions of grandeur?

The latest billionaire buffoon is Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook.
Having noticed that Jack Dorsey is out-doing him in the realm of leftist
political whackery, the social media kingpin has begun to wear his progressivism
on his sleeves. Facebook’s users — far more numerous than Twitter’s — are sure
to suffer.

Recently, we reported that Zuckerberg
reprimanded a number of Facebook employees who crossed out “Black Lives Matter”
slogans and replaced them with “All Lives Matter” on the company walls. You’d
think that a liberal like Zuckerberg would appreciate a message of
discrimination being replaced with a message of inclusiveness, but I suppose
that sort of thinking went out of fashion with Martin Luther King, Jr.

Given that Zuckerberg had to send out
the reprimand to the entire company, this suggests that the slogan-writers have
yet to be identified. Naturally, I hope they continue their efforts, but I
can’t help being a little curious about who they are. Given the number of black
Americans quietly fuming about the radical Black Lives Matter activists who try
and speak on their behalf, I wouldn’t be surprised if they themselves were
black.

You know, now that I think about it,
wasn’t that Martin Luther King, Jr. fellow with all his inclusive rhetoric also
black? Then again, as the University of California recently reminded us, he
really is out of fashion in progressive circles.

The truth is, most of us prefer
messages of unity over messages of division. That includes the 1 billion-plus
people who use Zuckerberg’s platform, and who Zuckerberg appears strangely
contemptuous of. Messages of unity bring people to the table to discuss
solutions, whereas messages of division cause pointless standoffs.

Zuckerberg’s out-of-touch attempt to stamp his own, elitist politics on
his employees is typical of Silicon Valley elites, whose hyper-progressive
values are even more distant to those of ordinary Americans than the
Washington, D.C. set.

But tyrannizing his employees isn’t the
worst thing Zuckerberg’s done.

That would be his Orwellian pandering
to the German government, whose disastrous immigration policies he recently
praised as “inspiring.” Under Zuckerberg’s leadership, Facebook has become
Germany’s lapdog, acting as the terrifying new Stasi of Angela Merkel, who is
desperate to contain her citizens’ anger at her failed immigration policies.

Facebook has promised to work with her
government to monitor “anti-migrant hate speech” on the platform, which is
another way of telling ordinary Germans that, once again, someone will be
looking over your shoulder if your conversation gets too politically
inconvenient.

Here’s what’s more troubling:
Zuckerberg isn’t just doing this to appease an overbearing government: he wants
to do it. He’s a true believer in Merkel’s death-by-migration strategy. Indeed,
he likes it so much that he wants to try it here in the U.S too. During a
recent visit to Germany (ominously, Facebook executives are becoming an
increasingly familiar sight in the country), the 31-year old CEO said that the
U.S should “follow Germany’s lead” on immigration.

After the mass-rapes, the flyers
helpfully advising immigrants not to be alarmed by gay people, and the migrant
centre murders, Zuckerberg thinks we should “follow Germany’s lead.” Genius in
business clearly doesn’t equate to genius in politics.

Should Americans be worried? Of course. Zuckerberg is a billionaire, and
he’s only 31. He presides over the largest social network in the world,
responsible for feeding information to over a billion people. He is — and will
continue to be — one of the most influential men in the country.

And he’s not alone. His wealth, his
influence, and his barmy progressive politics are shared by much of Silicon
Valley, which despite its recent stock troubles, represents the future of the
US economy. The academic Joel Kotin compares the leaders of big tech to the
industrial magnates of the late-19th century, whose financial and political
power dominated American government for decades. Zuckerberg is more than just a
successful geek: he represents a new class of near-omnipotent plutocrat elites.

The days when Facebook was confined to
college campuses are long gone. But it seems that Mark Zuckerberg’s politics,
and much of Silicon Valley’s, remain there. With an increasing amount of the
world’s wealth and communications under their control, America — and the world
— should be worried.

Well, I did warn you not to trust them.
A string of exposes in Gizmodo have exposed Facebook’s repeated assurances of
political neutrality to be just that — empty assurances. In reality, the
company regularly interferes in its own algorithms to suppress conservative
news, while amplifying progressive causes like Black Lives Matter.

We’ve come a long way from the
misty-eyed ideals that circulated in the tech world during the early days of
social media, in the late noughts and early 2010s. That was the golden age of
Silicon Valley utopianism, when tech promised to topple governments,
revolutionize industries, and put old media elites out of jobs.

The age of the great gatekeepers of information — Fox News, MSNBC, CNN —
was over. You could start a revolution from your blog, your Facebook page, your
Twitter account. As Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian smugly announced to a TED
talk in 2010, “You’ve Lost Control, and That’s OK!”

The old media elites certainly did lose
control. The web is unquestionably the communication platform of the future.
But who did the old media elites lose their control to? The people, riding the
democratizing wave of the internet?

That might have initially been the
case, in the days of Occupy Wall Street, Wikileaks, and the Arab Spring. But
today, it’s pretty clear that the internet is a baron’s revolution, not a
peasant’s revolution. Old media kingpins like Murdoch are simply being replaced
by new media elites like Zuckerberg and Dorsey. And the new boss is very much
the same as the old boss.

The change from social media as a democratic, people-powered tool of
free-flowing information to another top-down system in which elites feed
pre-approved information to the masses happened gradually. Destroying the dream
of liberated information in one fell swoop would have created too much uproar.
Instead, Facebook decided to poison it slowly.

First, users’ control over what they
saw on the platform was quietly taken away. In the old, democratic Facebook,
users saw posts from their friends chronologically and could sort their friends
into different categories to provide different flows of information: friends,
family, co-workers, and so forth.

In other words, users were originally
able to control what they saw on Facebook. Today, the picture has changed considerably.
Facebook largely controls what its users see. Instead of seeing posts from
their friends in chronological order, its now placed in front of users
according to opaque algorithms.

Sure, users still have to add friends
and follow accounts before they see anything on their feeds. And, of course,
they can block out information sources they don’t like. They still have some
control. But there’s no telling what criteria Facebook uses to determine what’s
relevant to their users.

Then there’s Facebook’s “trending news” feature, which we’ve heard all
about this week. Modelled on Twitter’s trending hashtags, the feature is
ostensibly designed to pull together the most popular news stories on Facebook,
presenting them in a list to its users.

In practice, as we saw this week, Facebook’s list of trending topics is
curated by a news team that is every bit as biased as MSNBC or CNN. Sources
inside the curation team say that links to conservative sites like Breitbart,
The Blaze, and The Washington Examiner are “regularly suppressed,” while
stories about pet progressive causes like Black Lives Matter are artificially
inserted into the rankings despite lacking the required popularity to make the
cut.

Gizmodo, the outlet that broke the
story, was blunt in its assessment. The once-revolutionary CEOs of social media
have morphed into carbon-copies of the very old media barons they were supposed
to “disrupt.” In other words, Facebook’s news section operates like a
traditional newsroom, reflecting the biases of its workers and the
institutional imperatives of the corporation.

So, after all the fears that
traditional newsrooms would disappear due to the disruptive power of the web,
we’re now left with …. a traditional newsroom. Really, was it all worth it?

Of course, it’s the little differences
that count. The CEOs who preside over Facebook and Twitter aren’t quite like
Rupert Murdoch, after all. They’re the product of zealous millennial
progressivism, coupled with a strong dose of San Francisco identity politics and
wrapped in the kind of insulation from the affairs of ordinary citizens that
only vast wealth can provide. They’re plutocrats — hyper-progressive ones.

And they control what more a billion of of us are going to read on the
internet.